The Indian Burial Ground in the Basement

I was walking the dog this weekend along Hammond Street, a quiet residential block squeezed on the hillside between busy Washington Avenue and the industrial district of lower East Bayside here in Portland. They're building two new apartment buildings on a lot at the end of the street, and have started digging out the foundations.

Fascinatingly, the basement excavation has revealed a cross-section of the hillside, which is full of shells. Mostly longneck clams, with a few oysters here and there:

 

The dense layers of shells are sandwiched between clayey marine soils that are typical of our neighborhood, and they follow the slope of the hillside, such that the same layers are visible twice in the excavation: once against the vertical wall on the uphill side, and once again on the floor:

I'm pretty confident that this is a Native American shell midden — a trash heap from seafood feasts of centuries past. Though it's several blocks and a freeway crossing away from the ocean today, this hillside used to drop straight down into the tidal flats of Back Cove, as you can see in this 1837 map of Portland. The red dot shows the site of this construction site, smack dab on the old shoreline:

Back Cove is a tidal basin — exactly the kind of place where longneck clams thrive, although you wouldn't want to eat them these days. Other parts of the shore around Back Cove were probably marshy and difficult to access from land, but this location, next to a steep hillside, probably offered more direct access to the flats for humans, and for clams, there was relative proximity to the nutrient-rich tidal flows at the Cove's outlet.

I've been kind of stumped by how the shell heaps are interspersed with layers of clayey soil. This photo shows the horizontal cross-section of two layers (on the future basement floor in the foreground) as well as the sloping vertical cross-section (on the street-facing wall, in the center of the photo). At the left edge of the photo is Anderson Street, which was once the shoreline. How did all that clay get in between? 

Stranger still is how some of the shell layers seem to overlap with each other:

My guess is that the steep slopes of the hillside probably set off occasional landslides, which would periodically bury a heap of shells under a thick layer of mud washed down from the higher ground above.

Any archaeologists care to comment?

Related post: Longfellow's Garbage

Update: Howard Reiche e-mailed me this this morning (Sept. 11):

The Knudsen home, which
stood on the site until this
summer. From the City of
Portland's 1924 tax records.

 Good for you. That was my grandfather’s (Knud Knudsen) house where he raised 13 children after immigrating from Denmark. We have a family photo of my mother, Laura Christine (Knudsen) Reiche, feeding the ducks in the water which came to the foot of their garden which I walked in many times..
    Hammond St. was named after the Hammond rope walk which was originally at that site. Possibly the “layers of clay” mystery had something to do with the construction or changing of the rope walk. 

From Skid Row to Starbucks

The alleged etymological origins of the term "skid row" are in the Pacific Northwest, in districts where lumbermen "skidded" logs down towards mills and ships lining the waterfront, and where disreputable trades served lumbermen who were eager to spend their earnings on vices after long and sober months in the woods.

One of the most famous skid rows is in the neighborhood around Seattle's Pioneer Square, centered around Henry Yesler's sawmill. The neighborhood followed a familiar skid row trajectory: first, the waterfront industry moved away. Then, urban renewal projects manifested the city's disrespect for the neighborhood by demolishing lots of buildings and leaving the rest to wither in the shadows of ugly, soot-soaked freeway viaducts. Under the traffic, intentionally hidden from view, strip clubs, drug vendors, and homeless agencies flourished.

And then, when developers realized how close these skid rows were to downtown, and how cheap the real estate still was, the skid rows quickly flipped into yuppie pleasure districts, from New York's Bowery to San Francisco's Tenderloin District. And Pioneer Square attained the ideal embodiment of this post-industrial destiny when Starbucks built its complex of corporate headquarters offices in the neighborhood.

By the time crews started excavating for the 4-level underground parking garage, they confirmed that the old age of logging was dead and buried. Literally.

Photo by Scott Durham, of centraldistrictnews.com

Instead of digging down into post-glacial gravel, backhoes found a morass of rotting timber instead: the discarded slash from the old mills, the century-old pilings of old wharves and railroads, and the miscellaneous debris that nineteenth-century land developers had tossed into the city's marshy waterfront to transform wetlands into dry quays above sea level.

This item came to my attention via hugeasscity, which noted that the city's plan to renovate the aging Alaskan Way Viaduct (the concrete urban renewal scar visible in the background of the photo above) calls for putting the freeway underground. Which sounds like a neat-o plan for a Tomorrowland version of Seattle, until you consider that the whole gleaming, modern Seattle waterfront district is actually built atop an unstable, sinking pile of wood. Plus an active fault line.

In the end, it doesn't matter how many lattes and condos you sell above ground: the roots of the city will always be in Skid Row.

PS- the bike tour to Walden post I'd promised yesterday is still coming - check back tomorrow! I'm going on a blogging tear this week to make up for lost time.

The Great Plastic Migration

This nature documentary about the trans-oceanic migrations of plastic bags is making the rounds today. The Californian nonprofit Heal the Bay is promoting the video as a means to rally support Assembly Bill 1998, which proposes to ban single-use plastic bags at California shops.

Note the appearance of the Los Angeles River around 2:20.

Though tongue-in-cheek, I would love to see more nature documentaries like this one. How about an episode about the larval stages of plastic bags, from the oil refinery to the grocery store?

Anyway, it's one thing to zoomorphize plastic bags. Why not anthropomorphize them as well - let them carry a human personality as they drift through the wind, freed from their more material cargo? This personality would necessarily need to have mixed feelings about its immortality - simultaneously self-important and lonely. And it would also have to feel a deep bitterness about its lack of agency, and resentment for the external natural forces that dictate its fate.

If you're saying to yourself, "Hey, that sounds a bit like Werner Herzog," you're in luck! He's precisely the man who narrates the thoughts of a lonely plastic bag in this video by director Ramin Bahrani:

After a tedious journey, Herzog the bag ends up in the Pacific Ocean as well, not particularly fulfilled by its migration, and somewhat bitter at its own failure to die.

The Curse of the Albatross

Photographer Chris Jordan's images of albatross carcasses, bloated with the plastic bits that starved them to death, are easily the most disturbing testimonials of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch I have seen so far.


Images from Midway: Message from the Gyre, by Chris Jordan, via www.chrisjordan.com

These photographs remind me of Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner."

At length did cross an Albatross,
Thorough the fog it came ;
As if it had been a Christian soul,
We hailed it in God's name.

It ate the food it ne'er had eat,
And round and round it flew.
The ice did split with a thunder-fit ;
The helmsman steered us through !

Images from Midway: Message from the Gyre, by Chris Jordan, via www.chrisjordan.com

But the Ancient Mariner of the title senselessly slays the bird, which brings a curse on the ship and its crew. They are tortured with thirst before a visit from a death-ship, yet the Mariner survives to suffer:

I looked upon the rotting sea,
And drew my eyes away ;
I looked upon the rotting deck,
And there the dead men lay.

The Mariner eventually makes penance. "He beholdeth God's creatures of the great calm" and "blessed them unaware." Then, "by grace of the holy Mother," he survives to tell the tale.

Coleridge's dead Albatross curses the Mariner with "a rotting sea;" today a similar trail of death swirls throughout the Pacific Gyre.

In a new profile in SEED Magazine, Jordan identifies our culture of consumption with the appetites of the Albatrosses:

"To me, the birds look like us: filling themselves with something that is not nourishing, thinking that it is, and killing themselves in the process. Isn’t that what we’re all doing as a culture? Our spirits are dying from our overconsumption of toxic plastic crap."

So: will the same death-ship that condemned the Mariner's crew visit us as well?

Or will we find the grace to save the oceans from a trillion plastic lighters and bottle caps?

Related: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, May 2008.

The Beach of Shredded Auto Parts

On Portland's western waterfront, between the Casco Bay and Veterans Bridges, lie the remains of a railyard that was abandoned sometime in the late 20th century. Along the collapsing granite seawall on one section is a mound of reddish soil, which, upon further inspection, isn't soil at all, but a finely-ground mixture of old rubber hoses, wire casings, nuts, washers, bits of fiberglass, and plastic.



These look like the remnants of scrapped automobiles that were sent through giant shredders at junkyards, then shipped by rail to this location. But the railyard went out of business, and the barge that was supposed to take them to some distant landfill never came.

So the temporary waterfront landfill became a permanent beach of shredded auto parts. Decades of oceanfront weather eroded the junk even further: now, the rubber is brittle to the touch and the metals are entirely rusted.

The junk has undoubtedly been leaching all sorts of toxic meatals into the adjacent Fore River Estuary for all these years: cadmium, lead, copper, zinc, and other poisons common to our automobiles. Yet, miraculously, a few scrubby juniper and aspen trees have managed to take root on the mound of shredded cars:

More Glaciers of Portland

Belatedly fulfilling my promise of more glacier photos...



The Fore River Glacier.
Just like other glaciers in the wild, the Fore River Glacier possesses an alluvial fan pattern that spreads out as it approaches the water.



The Bayside Glacier.
It's only a fraction of a size of last year's glacier, thanks to a planned office building and parking garage that was due to begin construction this spring. The construction project has been canceled due to the financial crisis. As long that the same crisis doesn't also cancel the city's Public Works Department, we can look forward to a Bayside Glacier returned to its former glory next winter.



The Sable Oaks Glacier.
A view from the summit of the city's main snow dump. More Sable Oaks Glacier photos here.

The Sable Oaks Glacier

Above: the mighty Sable Oaks Glacier, the final resting place of most of Portland's plowed snow and all the street grime and garbage that was buried beneath it during the past winter's snow storms.

The Sable Oaks Glacier is the city's main "snow dump," a larger version of the Bayside Glacier that has showed up downtown in the past couple of years. I've written about the city's glaciers previously on this blog (here and here), and in a feature for the Portland Phoenix last spring, but this was my first visit to the big one.

I visited this natural wonder this evening right before sunset. It's a time we scenic nature photographers call "the magic hour," because of the magical way the light dances across the filthy, shit-streaked snow.


The Glacier is out by the airport, past the overflow parking lot, at the city's public works yard. There are nice views and these photos can't convey the scale of this thing. I highly recommend visiting. More photos to come tomorrow.

The living landfill

It's our lucky week: the Economist has dedicated its Special Report section to the waste management industry. There's a lot to blog about, but for now, I'll focus on Waste Management's new "bioreactor" landfills.

For years, landfills have been carefully sequestered and sealed from the outside world: if nothing could get in, the thinking went, then none of the waste's toxic chemicals could leak out into surrounding groundwater. This theory has worked so well for modern landfills that the garbage inside has become more or less mummified: archaeologists have unearthed deep layers of late-20th-century dumps and discovered more or less intact scraps of food wrapped in legible, decades-old newspapers.

Of course, it's expensive to mummify garbage. For one thing, many dumps are trying to make a business out of harvesting methane (a.k.a. natural gas), which only gets produced underground if the garbage decomposes. For another, landfill real estate is expensive: landfill owners would appreciate it if produce from the disco era could rot away and make room for iPods and Miley Cyrus merchandise.

So instead of thinking of landfills as inert, unchanging piles, Waste Management, one of the nation's largest garbage collection and disposal corporations, has begun experiments to turn some of their landfills into "bioreactors." From Waste Management's website:

What is a bioreactor landfill? Simply put, it is a waste treatment landfill with technology that accelerates the decomposition of organic wastes in a landfill. This is accomplished by controlling the addition and removal of moisture from the waste mass, the collection and extraction of landfill gas, and in some instances the addition of air.

The landfill's hive of bacteria digests its waste, farts into a power plant, and opens its maw for more. The landfill is alive.

What really tickles me, though, is the fact that the bioreactor has particular tastes. Quoting from the Economist article:

Waste Management has tried pumping different mixtures through landfills to achieve the desired effect, and found that injections of out-of-date beer and soft drinks work better than water.

The results: Waste Management's bioreactors produce natural gas at four times the rate of other landfills and reduce the volume of garbage up to 35%, according to the Economist's report. The concept seems to be catching on: after the success of a pilot bioreactor in Florida, officials are applying the same techniques to four additional landfills.

Here's where you can read more about bioreactors:

bioreactor.org
US EPA: Bioreactors

Inner-city wilderness areas in the news

Some recommended reading:

Robert Sullivan (the same guy who wrote Rats) has an article in New York Magazine about Fresh Kills Landfill, where piles of garbage "about the height of Mexico’s Great Pyramid of Cholula" are currently being repurposed to become one of New York City's largest parks. Here's a post I'd written about Fresh Kills Park last summer.

In an age when our remaining inner-city wildnernesses are usually abandoned industrial or military sites, the new park's designers are hoping to set a new standard in park design: "They would not build a new park on top of an old dump. Instead, they would make the old dump a part of the new park, by acknowledging it, reclaiming it, recycling it on behalf of a modern metropolis."


The future of Fresh Kills: cross-country skiing on half a century's accumulation of garbage. Rendering courtesy of Field Operations.

Sullivan's article is also rich with garbage trivia: the Sanitation Dept. processes 312 gallons of liquid dump excretions from Fresh Kills every minute. "Henry David Thoreau, living in Staten Island while trying to get freelance writing work in Manhattan, used to walk onto the marsh island in Fresh Kills to dig arrowheads, 'the surest crop.'” And the urban archaeological artifacts buried there include "a million dollars’ worth of cocaine and heroin accidentally lost in a garbage scow (1948); eight capsules of radium accidentally taken from a doctor’s office (1949); a leg, possibly from a gangland-style hit (1974)."

Read the whole story here, or find out more about Fresh Kills Park from the official City website.

Elsewhere, the Times Escapes section ran a story last week on inner-city hiking trails with city skyline views. The article included trail recommendations in DC, Pittsburgh, Philly, NYC, Hartford, Boston, and Portland. All good places to walk off your Thanksgiving meals.

Edward Burtynsky's "Manufactured Landscapes"

For the next month, Bowdoin College's "Center for the Common Good" is hosting a number of events centered around the "Manufactured Landscapes" photography of Edward Burtynsky.

Edward Burtynsky: Oil Refineries No. 18,
Saint John, New Brunswick 1999

Burtynsky is an Ansel Adams for 21st-century environmentalism. Like Adams, he produces stunning, large-format photographs that are beautiful and can induce a sense of vertigo from their epic scale. While Adams was closely associated with 20th-century environmental groups like the Wilderness Society and Sierra Club, and was a strong advocate for preserving an idea of "pristine" nature, Burtynsky makes the human use of nature - in places like mines, Chinese factories, and landfills - his primary subject. Burtynsky is also aligned with the vanguard of 21st-century environmentalism, WorldChanging.com (check out this video he made for them).

Edward Burtynsky: Bao Steel #2,
Shanghai, 2005

Unfortunately, I'm afraid the internet can't do fair justice to these photographs. Luckily for those of us who live in Maine, an exhibition of Burtynsky's photographs will run at Bowdoin College in Brunswick from October 23rd to Christmas, in conjunction with a number of lectures and screenings of Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary of Burtynsky. Here's the schedule of events.

Elizabeth Royte in Portland

Coming soon to Fryeburg?

Elizabeth Royte, who wrote the world's preeminent field guide to solid waste, Garbageland, is coming Portland, Maine to talk about her new book, Bottlemania, a field guide to the watersheds of the global market economy.

I haven't read the new book yet, so I've got my homework cut out for me. But I have read favorable reviews and learned that a substantial portion of the book focuses on Fryeburg, Maine, where the Poland Spring Aquifer Mining Company is facing some community opposition to its proposals to install new on-shore drilling platforms in the area.

Royte will give two readings: one at the Portland Public Library's free brown bag lunch series, at noon, and another at One Longfellow Square, sometime in the evening, for a $5 admission. More details are and will be at the Rabelais Books blog.

Catch of the Day

As seen on Treehugger:
The Surfrider Foundation packages the bounty of our beaches into seafood containers, which are then sold locally at farmers' markets. So Californians in Newport Beach can enjoy this fillet of condoms (note the safe handling instructions: "Every day, 1.3 billion gallons of partially treated sewage and trash are dumped into the ocean"), and Texans can partake of the Aerosol Valu-Pak:



Butts and Bits from Venice Beach:

Maine Granolas OK With Recycling Plastic

In a post last week, I'd written about the Berkeley, California Ecology Center's critiques of recycling plastic. Those criticisms led the Ecology Center to recommend not recycling plastic at all, rather than give people false assurances that might prompt people to consume more plastic than they need to.

That post prompted some more investigation from reader and local city councilor John Anton, who also happens to be on the board of ecomaine, the uncapitalized regional waste management company here in southern Maine. He sent my post to Kevin Roche, ecomaine's general manager, to ask about where our own plastics end up. Here was Roche's response, in its entirety (emphasis and links are my own):

Hi John -

I've been selling plastic scrap since 1989 and have visited many plastic processing facilities during my time in the industry. Back in the late 80's and early 90's, it was tough to find markets for plastic and often times you wouldn't get any revenue for it. But it was still better than sending it to a landfill so we continued to market it to a variety of processors who chip it, wash it, and palletize for the use in new products and packaging. I witnessed this being done first hand so I'm confident that when you put this much effort into processing scrap, that it goes to good use.

Today, the markets have matured substantially...

The non-colored (natural) HDPE milk jugs (marked with a number 2 on the bottom) are now commanding over $800 per ton ($18,000 per trailer load). We sell a lot of this material to a Company in York PA called Graham Packaging which makes new plastic containers for detergents and cleaners (non-food).

The Colored HDPE #2 containers are sold to various markets (including Graham Packaging) at $600 per ton. Again, they make new bottles out of scrap bottles.

The PET #1 containers are sorted automatically by our scanner and sold at $400 per ton to various markets that make carpet or stuffing for sleeping bags and jackets, etc.

The 3-7 plastic we mix and sell together because we don't get enough of any one of them to substantiate accumulating them in separate loads. These markets are in their infancy (just like the #1 & #2 markets were 18 years ago). However they're the smallest percentage of what we process... See below.

Make up of the Plastics we process:

Colored HDPE #2: 28%
Natural HDPE #2: 25%
PET #1: 25%
Plastics #3-#7: 22%

We just started selling 3-7 plastic last year and we've averaged $45 per ton. Not nearly what the other plastics bring in but at least we're getting paid for it. Because there are limited markets for this material right now, we sell it to various brokers. Because they pay us for it, they can't simply afford to landfill it. It's sold to lower end markets but our hope is the markets will improve for this material over time as it has for the other plastics.

I hope this helps. Kevin.

So in Maine, at least, plastic recycling is pretty beneficial. Still, recycling does consume a lot of energy and resources, and note that even here, plastics are "downcycled" - that is, transformed from food-grade to non-food containers, or from water bottles to jacket insulation. And recycling plastics other than HDPE #2 and PET #1 is obviously more problematic, for now. Note that Roche does not know where those plastics end up - it's entirely possible that purchasers may be scouring that 22% portion of our plastic recycling to cherry-pick what they can and landfill the rest.

It's also important to note that ecomaine is a nonprofit owned by its 21 member communities, which helps to make its management considerably more open, progressive, and innovative than most waste management companies. I mean, would Tony Soprano have bothered to write the response above? Unfortunately, most American communities shouldn't expect this level of service from their own local recycling haulers. But as Roche has proven here, it's worth asking them about it.

So using less plastic is still far better than recycling plastic, but here in southern Maine, anyhow, recycling is better than burying or incinerating it with the rest of our garbage. Just make sure your plastic doesn't blow away into the nearest river or coastline when you set it out on the curb every week.

Berkeley Granolas Just Say "No" to Recycling Plastic

Tomorrow is the neighborhood trash pick-up day. And like most Wednesday mornings, I will go outside and find the streets littered with milk jugs, plastic wrap, and take-out containers that have fallen out or blown away from household recycling bins. I'd venture to guess that the majority of my neighborhood's litter comes from recycling - it's not as though many people would intentionally throw their organic salad greens containers and cute-little-butter-girl boxes into the gutter. Of course, you know where all that trash is headed next.

We could do a better job of piling heavy stuff on top of our recycling bins so the lighter stuff doesn't blow away. Or better yet, if it's windy out, keeping the recycling inside until the next week.

Or better still - don't recycle plastic. That's the line of action endorsed by Berkeley, California's Ecology Center. Read their Seven Misconceptions About Recycling Plastic on their web site.

Did you know that the triangular chasing-arrows symbol is an invention of the plastics industry? The Ecology Center asserts, "The arrows are meaningless." This isn't entirely true - the numbers do differentiate different types of plastic, from #1 polyester to #5 polypropylene - but the Ecology Center is correct in the sense that the numbers are basically meaningless to recycling centers. No one actually looks at the symbols and sorts the plastics by number. In fact, plastic with a #7 symbol is categorized as "Other," meaning that it's essentially unrecyclable.

Since the plastic all gets mixed together, it can't be re-used as food containers or bottles. Instead, it's typically melted together and re-formed to produce a limited number of products that don't require high-quality materials. You may have seen parking lot bumpers or picnic tables made from a grainy plastic - these are generally made from recycled materials, but they themselves can not be recycled again.

Plus, there just isn't enough demand for cheap picnic tables to use all of the plastic that Americans put out in their recycling bins. In most West Coast cities, then, a lot of plastic recycling gets shipped to China on barges. Once it gets there, Chinese factories use some of it to produce low-grade plastic containers. But much of it just ends up going into Chinese rivers or landfills.

It's less clear what East Coast cities do with their excess plastic (we have a sort of social agreement with the waste industry where we don't want to know what happens to our garbage, and they don't tell us), but it's a safe bet that a lot of it goes to landfills. Even if that's the case, at least we're not shipping it to China first.

Please read Elizabeth Royte's Garbageland, linked at right, for a much more in-depth look at where plastic goes after we "recycle" it.

But long story short, plastics can generally be recycled only once, and a lot of it doesn't get recycled at all. The Ecology Center has actually campaigned for years to prevent recycling trucks from collecting plastic: "There is a likelihood that establishing plastics collection might increase consumption by making plastic appear more ecologically friendly both to consumers and retailers. Collecting plastics at curbside could legitimize the production and marketing of packaging made from virgin plastic." They also point out that legitimizing plastics contributes to the declining viability of glass containers - and glass, unlike plastic, is an unambiguously recyclable material.

This is essentially the source of my unease about most "green" consumption, from carbon offsets to glitzy suburban land trusts. On one hand, it's great that people want to recycle, or generate less carbon per mile, or save a forest. But if that warm and fuzzy feeling they get induces them to use more plastic, or drive more, or build a bigger McMansion, then what good does it do any of us?

So reduce the amount of plastic you acquire. Reuse the stuff you can't avoid picking up. But when you think of throwing any of it away, remember that there are good reasons to send it straight to the landfill, instead of sending it on a temporary detour through the recycling center.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Left: a "trash boom" in the Los Angeles River collects floating waste that had washed away from city streets after a storm. This photo by Rick Loomis was part of a Pulitzer-winning report on plastics in the world's oceans from the Los Angeles Times.

There's a lot of plastic on the loose - and not just in treetops. As alluded to in the previous post, a lot of it ends up washing away: down the nearest storm drain, into a river, and out into the ocean, where plastics make a languorous journey along the ocean's currents until they arrive in a stagnant patch of dead water in the middle of the Pacific known as the North Pacific Gyre - or more recently known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Charles Moore, an oceanographer studying the Patch, estimates that this patch of ocean, twice the size of Texas, might contain about 100 million tons of floating plastic confetti (source).

But you probably already know about this, as it's been well-documented on the Internet and in excellent documentaries like this amazing series from Vice magazine.

I'm more interested in the recent Crusade against Plastic Bags. Have you noticed how this has become an environmental flash point? Across the nation, yuppie grocery stores and yuppie cities are banning plastic bags outright.

Even though it shouldn't be lost on anyone that floating plastic, in and of itself, is a relatively minor environmental problem in the grand scheme of things, and even though I suspect that the yuppies are using their plastic bag bans as a way to forgive themselves for the massive volumes of other petroleum products that they habitually use, burn, or throw away, I'm generally encouraged by this new cultural suspicion of plastic.

But it's also strange. I mean, we've been seeing plastic trash tangled in trees and washed up at the high tide line for decades now. We made that Indian cry 30 years ago. What's different now?

I think that the Garbage Patch story might be a big part of it. The Gyre is one of the most isolated patches of ocean on Earth - and yet, humans have managed to unwittingly send millions of tons of garbage there. A newly-discovered floating continent of plastic makes for a pretty compelling story. It might even be better than drowning polar bears.

But I think that the more critical force behind this phenomenon is the general surge in concern about environmental issues - especially global warming. Ostensibly, plastic garbage has very little to do with the climate crisis. But if you're worried about the climate, you're also extremely frustrated at the lack of political leadership on the issue, and at the lack of opportunities - beyond switching lightbulbs - that individuals have to do anything about it.

In this context of general frustration, though, we've found something we can seize on: plastic bags. Here's something that individuals can claim for themselves as a small but meaningful gesture.

Compared to climate change, plastic garbage is a small problem. But this new prejudice against plastic bags shouldn't be looked at as a rearranging of deck chairs on the Titanic: it's a small but significant rejection of the American disposable culture. The oil and energy we save from producing a few less plastic bags isn't nearly as significant or meaningful as the idea that we should reuse things instead of throwing them away.